Aircraft flight displays continue to advance in sophistication, achieving increasingly higher levels of information density and, consequently, presenting a greater amount of visual information to be perceived and understood by the operator. In many situations, it is important that visual displays provide a proper cognitive mapping between what the operator is trying to achieve and the information available to accomplish the task. As a result, such systems increasingly utilize human-factor design principles in order to build instrumentation and controls that work cooperatively with human operators as efficiently as possible.
One area in particular that has not profited in advances is the field of aircraft flight management systems (FMS). Specifically, in current generation aircraft, flight plan entry and editing continues to be performed using cumbersome, manual entry text-based techniques which have not changed significantly in the decade. As a result, flight crews frequently complain that current flight management systems are non-intuitive, require too much information entry, are difficult to interpret and require too much heads-down time due in part to the awkward methods available for data entry and positioning of instrumentation.
For example, in current generation aircraft, flight management systems require a user to use a manual entry methodology based on the entry of text on a keypad and entering the text identifiers into the FMS by selecting line select keys that surround the display area (such as seen in FIG. 1). Thus, for example, a waypoint is manually entered into a keypad entry area or scratchpad 4 on a key pad (not shown in FIG. 1), and then a line select key 16 is selected to enter the contents of the scratchpad into the corresponding field (see FIG. 1) on a display 14. In the current systems, such manual entries are made in different areas or fields on the display 14. For example, in a typical control and display unit (CDU) or multifunction CDU (MCDU) as depicted in FIG. 1, if the air traffic controller requires the operator of the aircraft in an airway routing to follow airway J102 between location ZUN and location GOSIP, the specific text ZUN must be manually typed on a key pad and entered in the display field on the right at the 4th line select key (4R), the text J102 must by typed on a key pad and entered in the display field adjacent to 5L, and the text GOSIP must be typed on a key pad and entered in the display field 5R. Text entry is tedious because the pilot must stop typing, look at the display and decide where each entry goes before the next item can be entered. Moreover, the key pads do not follow a standard QWERTY key pattern, thereby making it difficult to quickly manually enter text. If a mistake is made, the system displays an error message in the scratchpad (such as, for example, “INVALID ENTRY”). In this event, the scratchpad 14 must be cleared manually before the entry can be re-entered.
As stated previously, flight crews often complain that such manual text entry for any component within an aircraft's FMS is difficult, cumbersome, requires too much heads-down tim and is often difficult to predict the outcome of such text entry. Moreover, the problems associated with such manual text entry are exacerbated for short flight periods, for aircraft which travel at much higher speeds (such as supersonic aircraft) and for those aircraft having a limited crew to fly the aircraft In some situations the crew abandons use of the FMS because the cockpit workload is too high to allow for reprogramming the system. In such cases, the pilots decide to fly the airplane using the aircraft's autopilot function.
Methods are therefore needed in order to overcome these and other limitations of the prior art. What is needed is a method for reducing crew workload by providing an efficient, easy and quick method for entering text within a FMS flight path plan. What is also needed is a method which provides an aircraft operator with alternate selection of aircraft approach and arrival procedures. Methods such as those disclosed in the present invention would provide lower initial and recurring costs and further provide greater safety to the occupants of the aircraft.